The American Academy of Religion Meeting 2019 - San Diego, CA
Establishments and Their Fall: Direct Mail, the New Right, and the Remaking of American Politics II
Compared to their Democratic colleagues at the time, conservative thinkers and organizers were revolutionaries, if not prophets of things to come, when it came to how political constituencies would become increasingly segmented according to socio-economic status in the name of electoral strategy. They were also novel for their times in how they waged political warfare against their respective “establishments”: liberal liberaland otherwise. In each case, direct mail was the ideal option, or weapon of choice, because its contents were inflammatory, and the means of dissemination lay outside the usual chains of command and communication. If the 1960s were about anything in regards to the burgeoning culture wars that lay on the not so distant horizon, they were about the retuning of American public itself to “the social issue.” Typically desribed in today’s parlance as “hot botton issues” or “single issue” campaigning, social issues such as racial justice, women’s rights, human sexuality, and prayer in public schools did nothing less than recalibrate American political life itself seemingly around the feminist declaration, “the personal is the political.” Moving forward, what one did in the privacy of one’s living space became the stuff of everyday political debate and contestation. While single-issue strategy had been initially deployed in the name of civil rights and social justice, it would quickly be deployed by Viguerie and other New Right strategists in an attempt to lure away the likes of Archie Bunker and others from the Democratic fold and into the outstretched arms of Kevin Phillips, William Rusher, and others in the New Right wings. The use of Direct Mail would make much of this transformation possible. It would also help redefine political activism itself as an exercise in contribution making by way of the US post office.
For most intents and purposes, Direct Mail during the early 1970s was used mostly by those in marketing, advertising, and other corporate positions in the world of business. In most cases, Direct Mail was an effective but costly way of generating interest and financial support for one’s given marketing campaign or product in the marketplace. The logic, or genre, of Direct Mail itself made many of these aspirations possible because it relied on form of affective encouragement for its various readerships. Combined with the newly coined “Positioning” approach in advertising that was developed specifically to challenge the dominant brand in a given moment, conservative operatives went about rewiring American public life according to the myriad connections made between party and constituency through the Direct Mail campaign. Due to these technological developments, this time period is a particularly important one in the history of American conservatism because it marked the moment when professional consultants were brought in to advise campaign-making and branding in a professional manner for both Republicans and Democrats. Richard Viguerie in particular fit this mold to a “T” when compared to the publishing prowess of Rusher and the grand strategy of Howard Phillips, a fellow conservative who also worked to “defund the left” from within the confines of the federal government.
While some commentators and scholars of American religion have examined the impact of Direct Mail on conservative motivation and strategy formation in the recent past, much of the work in American religious history has instead examined what “activated” or catalyzed the “Rise of the Christian Right.” Much of this work has focused on the content of said rise in an effort to explain how exactly the Right arose to such social and political prominence so quickly- and under the proverbial radar, as it were. In most cases, historians of American religion either use Southern racism or American misogyny to explain the Christian Right’s “rise” and subsequent power in the public square. It is my contention today that such narratives of “a rise” speak more to a form of journalistic and scholarly analysis that is as reactionary and bewildered as it is empirical and objective. In other words, American conservatism’s rise to dominance is better understood less through WHAT conservatives argued for or defended, and more about HOW their various marketing campaigns were disseminated around the country. In my estimation and forthcoming work, Direct Mail is best understood as the circulatory apparatus needed to make possible 3 distinct but interrelated phenomena in histories of the recent American past: the rise of Ronald Reagan, the ascendance of our ubiquitous, polarized present, and the proliferation of distinctly conservative ideas about free markets and their flourishing under the guise of free-flowing capital and porous international borders. Here are a few salient examples and aspects of Direct Mail to take note of in two senses, content and genre of delivery, that directly informed conservatives’ ability to remake a populous in its own image.
In 1982, the Columbia Journalism Review published one of the earliest scholarly accounts of Direct Mail and its impact on American public life. Titled provocatively, “Direct Mail: The Underground Press of the 80s,” author Ralph Whitehead contended that much more than simply raising much needed campaign funds, Direct Mail had a far more insidious purpose: “to mould your thinking.” By the early 1980s, upwards of 15 Million pieces of Direct Mail were coursing through the circulatory system of the republic. This amounted to half the circulation of one of America’s most well known periodicals: The Wall Street Journal. “For its millions of steady readers, political mail plays a crucial role in forming opinion,” Whitehead contended. “To do this...it must do its work apart from and even in opposition to such journalistic conventions as balance and objectivity.” Put another way, Direct Mail functioned as an amplification system designed to cultivate a form of ideational resonance fit for a deregulatory age of culture war and neoliberal ascent. It also challenged taken for granted journalistic conventions such as source verification and the inherent value of “facts.” Instead, new conventions were born: ones that would forever change the character of public deliberation and debate.
“One of the conventions of these letters...is THE STRIKING FACT,” Whitehead points out. “Usually slammed home in a single sentence, this bold but documented assertion is designed to fuse emotion and information for maximum impact.” In this sense, for Whitehead, “Information counts just as much as emotion does in the formula for political letters.” Conservative strategists and operatives appreciated these aspects of Direct Mail much sooner than their political counterparts. Not unlike other moments in which a new technology graced the activities of Republican and Democrat alike, it was the Republican in question who more often than not realized how to use such a gift on behalf of his or her larger electoral aspirations. This would also be the case with television as evangelist after conservative evangelist deployed the airwaves on behalf of their understanding of the gospel. In response, they were labeled “Televangelists” by those who thought they understood the nature of the burgeoning conflict better. There are too many liberal commentators and academic critics to cite in this regard, but for the sake of discussion, the failure of progressive actors to take advantage of these moments of technological efficacy lies at their feet and theirs’ alone. In response, liberals would accuse conservatives of “hijacking of religion” in the name of political expediency and partisan politics.
In short, what I would like to suggest today is that recent histories of American political and religious life are intimately intertwined with related histories and analyses of emergent technologies and provocative marketing and advertising campaigns on behalf of both the Republican and Democratic parties. While Republican strategists like Richard Viguerie would ultimately put Direct Mail to better use in the name of political power and electoral than his cultural combatants, this moment was less about what Conservatives SAID specifically, and more about how they disseminated their message to the masses. For Democratic strategist Frank O’Brien, the difference between conservative and liberal appropriations at the time couldn’t be more different. “So liberals used mail to pay the bills,” he remarked, “while conservatives used it to move the country.”
In many ways this observation serves as a timely reminder of what remains to be done as the 2020 election looms on the proverbial horizon. For my purposes moving forward, I would like to suggest that someone like Richard Viguerie is deserving of our careful and imaginative study. While Viguerie’s contribution to American public life was ultimately his deployment of Direct Mail as a fund-raising tactic, there is a far more significant insight to take note of. Viguerie and others used Direct Mail to not only attack the power structures of American political life itself, but also to bring unbeknownst constituencies into existence later to be labeled, “The Christian Right” by journalists and liberal commentators. In this sense, Direct Mail was as much a MEDIUM as it was a MESSAGE. Not unlike our consumption of social media, Direct Mail as a genre of communication also cultivated a particular political subject in the public square- one that was easily agitated to act in the name of the body politic. Direct Mail’s ability to create a “clear line on an emotional issue [circumvented] the constraints of ordinary party politics.”
If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because it should. In many ways, we continue to occupy the world that Direct Mail made for us all those decades ago. Its ability to speak to multiple emotional registers simultaneously in an effort to drive home a singular point revolutionized how political actors would make their cases to the American people for the foreseeable future. It is this blend of rational appeal and affective ferfur that is most fascinating in the recent history of Conservative mobilization and argumentation. This particular strata of Conservative theorizing, which included Richard Viguerie, strategist Kevin Phillips, and others arguably deserves greater and sustained attention moving forward. The recent infamy of Trump advisor Stephen Miller’s white nationalist emails speaks to a much longer tradition of Conservative politics making using whatever means necessary. Instead of rejecting such arguments out of hand, we must instead recommit ourselves to a collective attempt to name the multiple dimensions of fascist organizing in our Neo-Liberal age. Luckily, our present world of social media and instantaneous information sharing is not that far removed from the world remade by Viguerie and his fellow conservative strategists through Direct Mail in the name of principle over party. To me, it is to this ideational consistency that we must turn if we are to truly understand the last half century of American religion and politics. Thank you very much for your time and attention, and I look forward to the subsequent conversation. Thank you.